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Garfield, 8/20/05

My personal curmudgeonly opinion is that the less said about the 75th anniversary Blondie mutual wank-a-thon, the better, but I feel compelled to drag Saturday’s Garfield out to help illustrate why comics characters drawn by different artists shouldn’t be put in close proximity to one another. Because I’ve been reading Garfield pretty much since I achieved rudimentary literacy, but it wasn’t until I saw Jon next to Dagwood that I realized that OH MY GOD HE HAS NO NOSE! I MEAN, LOOK AT HIM! HIS ENORMOUS, BULBOUS EYES ARE JUST SITTING DIRECTLY ABOVE HIS UPPER LIP! SWEET JESUS CHRIST THAT’S CREEPY! I’m sure the architects of this huge crossoverfest were looking to instill a sense of “warm and fuzzy” in their readers; for me, anyway, they got “aesthetically unsettled” instead.

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Blondie, 7/14/05

So Blondie’s 75th anniversary continuity-thon is in full desperately clumsy swing, illustrating via its stumbly awkward weirdness why the strip does not generally tackle multi-day story arcs. Today’s strip intrigues me though. I’m assuming “Raphael” is either Blondie’s gay hairdresser or a Ninja Turtle who does hair styling as a sideline. The notion of a new ‘do for Blondie is also interesting. Will it be as shocking as Ma Family Circus’ sensible bob was in its day?

But I have to admit that what really caught my eye was this: in panels two and three, Blondie is sitting with her back to us and partly obscured by the sofa, and yet we can still see one of her breasts. And how many 75-year-olds can we say that about?

By the way, my jury service has come to an end. The case did not fit, so we had to acquit. Then the city gave me $30 for my trouble. Woo-hoo!

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Blondie, 6/6/05

I don’t have anything in particular to say about this Blondie strip, except that I like the word “Glambaster.” Is it someone’s last name? A product manufactured by the studiously ambiguous corporation that is Dithers Enterprises? An internal code name for some project in development? Whatever it is, it just rolls off the tongue. Glambaster! Glambaster! It’s the sort of thing that makes you think, “How would this word be portrayed in some sort of photo-rebus?” Well, wonder no more:

I thank you for your time.